Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just
the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing
lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American
copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that
magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you
can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth
century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his
life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the
natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and
there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan
Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free.
For this review, I read Switzerland,
published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of
inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary
words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity,
projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were
watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred
years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences
that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that
aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.”
His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic
dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous
and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the
mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use,
but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his
style.

It's worth noting, too, that this
pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty
Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former
British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to
caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping
generalizations about why they are the way they are, while
simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the
chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that
human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble)
nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience,
revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time
not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and
ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the
ride, Switzerland is
fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what
was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes
in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote
about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake
Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain,
and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter
on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay
of mountains, includes this note:

“M.
Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the
glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data
perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general
retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century
throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He
suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation
of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss
glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe,
are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as
the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the
disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom
of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the
Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a
different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures
of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the
moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has
changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free
ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

Veronique
Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes
about everything from caffeine
chemistry to cold
cures to Jelly
Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American,
TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter
here.